Habituating behaviors are the result of free will actions on our part.More >>

Habituating behaviors are the result of free will actions on our part. More >>

Can writing and, more broadly, the rule of law survive the Internet?

It depends upon what kind of writing — and law — you’re talking about.

A brief survey about how a certain kind of writing, literature, shaped history informs us that “The history of writing begins in Mesopotamia around 3500 BC with the inscribing of clay tablets, but it is the Phoenicians who are credited with devising the first modern alphabet and the Chinese with the invention of paper.”

Likely you remember all this from high school or earlier. But Martin Puchner, a Harvard professor of English and Comparative Literature, reminds us of it and more in his new book, “The Written Word.”

Puchner tells us that there have been times, most recently in Stalinist Russia, when citizens threw almost everything on paper away and used memory alone as a store of information. People were afraid of being sent to camps on suspicion of betraying the state. Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, for example, committed all her work to memory in 1910 and thereafter. She didn’t write her work down again until it appeared in 1963 as “Requiem,” in Germany and in Russia in 1989,” Puchner reports.

For long durations — across centuries — memory alone carried the day over the act of writing. “The Written Word” explains that before Christ, “Socrates envisaged a time when we would forget how to remember.” The result was that people long ago performed extraordinary feats of memory. They could recite works such as “The Iliad,” “The Odyssey,” the “Epic of Gilgamesh” and the Indian epic “Ramayana.”

That oral transmission of literature, our author remarks, united so many people in the past that it seems tragic that rote-learning should now have fallen so far out of favor. It is doubtful that in the age of the Internet, there will be forthcoming a new appetite for literature with a “slow, collective, oral gestation.”

When Johannes Guttenberg built his printing press two millennia later in the fifteenth century, he did it with borrowed Eastern techniques, more what Puchner calls an “idea transfer” than a real invention. But within a hundred years of its invention, the printing press was putting out “Martin Luther’s sermons at a faster rate than the Church could throw them in the fire.”

You might think of the printing press in the production of writing as a speedy and efficient prototype that led to rosier times. In fact, this first step in getting ideas words on paper and distributed quickly to a waiting public had a huge downside. “It could be harnessed against writers,” Puchner tells us.

It meant that literature now could become circumvented by what we would now call plagiarists, those who copied others’ work without giving them credit. Plagiarists offered bogus sequels, as in the case of Cervantes’ “Don Quixote.” Cervantes knew it was the ‘new world of print,’ the press, which made this threat of his work being taken away from him a reality.

And today, criminality on the Internet, the 21st century equivalent of the printing press, goes far beyond plagiarism. There is a huge trafficking in stolen identity in what are called ‘bot accounts.’

Result: the varying kinds of acceptable writing on the Internet, important as that is, is one of a congeries of major problems that comes with new technology and the forgetting or ignoring of old moralities. This is where ‘the rule of law’ comes in.

According to a NYT front page story, “Buying Online Influence From a Shadowy Market” on Jan. 28, 2018, various social media outlets are the conduits of huge counterfeit data in ‘fake followers’ bought and sold surreptitiously to improperly support political, social or personal popularity. This booming criminal social media enterprise has infested the Internet. It runs into the billions of dollars of social media fraud.

The enterprise involves “large-scale social media theft that involves fake accounts deployed by governments, criminals and entrepreneurs, now infesting social media calculations” that may go beyond as many as 48 million of Twitter’s reported active users, nearly 15 percent, simulating real people.

Russian involvement in America’s elections, employed to disrupt our democracy, is part of this larger fraud.

Part 2 of this commentary will consider the latest threats to writing — this vast one among them — that have come about largely because of the Internet’s ‘wild west’ environment. The internationalism of the Internet largely ignores governments. Major companies like Google, Twitter, and others attend to their obscene profits. Meantime, online bad actors, with only an occasional slap on the wrist, are getting away with plenty.

— Michael D. Langan is the NBC-2.com Culture Critic. Dr. Langan has written for the BBC, The Dublin Review of Books, and numerous U. S. newspapers.